My family is a Jewish Iranian family, but I was born in Turkey and raised in Italy. So it's a very mixed background.
The Chinese, the African, and the European - they are all there. So the division of the Caribbean experience into being emphatically only African is absurd.
My work has been much more Caribbean and eclectic. I am interested in people, and where they come from happens to have fallen within an area of Africa.
By growing up in Alabama, I had a melting pot of the whole pie: R&B, gospel, country.
I guess one of the things that is an advantage of the world in which we live is that I can at least I can have multiple homes. I can have that attachment to Montana and to Cambridge and to India.
My father is Chinese, Spanish, and Filipino; my mother is half-Irish and half-Japanese; Greek last name; born in Hawaii, raised in Germany.
I'm a bit of a mongrel, really!
I'm not sure where I'm from! I was born in London. My father's from Ghana but lives in Saudi Arabia. My mother's Nigerian but lives in Ghana. I grew up in Boston.
Half my family was from the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the other half was U.S. Army, and I was raised on Army posts during my childhood, so I pretty much began my life with a split-brain sort of thing.
